Play the good ones, don't play the bad ones

I have been making games for fifteen years, and I still cannot explain to my own child why the game they are playing is a bad one. I do have arguments, mind you — I can talk about the crude level dynamics, or the wonky progression and the broken balance.

The whole gameplay of the thing my child plays essentially consists of rearranging furniture and dishes in a house. I can break down point by point how interesting the game is, assess its balance, highlight the problems — the trouble is that every point of mine gets heard, nodded at, and the dish-rearranging continues. My «objectively» turns out to be not some finely calibrated instrument in demand on the market, but simply somebody's irritation with a claim to expertise.

The game you are playing right now works the way it was designed to, and it most likely has gacha (light, but present), sessions, dailies, seasons, passes and a leaderboard. It is not «badly made» — it is made superbly, well optimised not for your evening but for your year. The people who made it understand game design better than you or I do, and calling it bad is like calling a screwdriver a bad hammer.

And a game that really is badly made will be wonky, unfinished and broken in places, yet it can grow a community that lives for years. Something other than design is at work here; let us call it the game's soul... not every «good» game has one.

The game is not for you. It is for kids, for women, for fishermen, for people who love spreadsheets and driving a tractor through the woods... oh, or lying in those same woods as a rock, watching a tractor go by. Judging it by any criteria is exactly as pointless as judging your favourite roguelike by the criteria of someone who enjoys rearranging dishes in a virtual house.

Retention

Retention was not invented by marketers for money; it is older than any battle pass and it is present in every game you have ever liked. Elden Ring is a retention loop of «okay, one more time, I know his attacks now». Hades is progression between runs, deliberately designed so that losing does not throw you out of the game. BG3 holds you with a script and a story, «and what happens in the next scene» — and those scenes add up to three hundred hours. Remember Tetris, which held people for years without a single server, and the hours logged there are ungodly.

There is no difference between a «good» and a «bad» game in terms of having retention — or at least I have not spotted one. In Hades the loop is the game; you paid for it once when you bought it. In a nominal session game the loop is only the shop window, and you are offered the chance to pay for the right not to wait. The mechanism is exactly the same; the only thing that moved is where the cash register stands.

That still does not settle the question of «why does it work», and it works because the human brain likes things simple and fast — but why does the same mechanic look like craftsmanship in one case and like manipulation of your time in another?

Friction

The most underrated quantity in any conversation about games is not quality, not depth and not a review score — it is friction, that is, how much effort it takes to start playing. What does a «proper» game demand on a weekday evening?

remember your build                   →  10 minutes
read up on what the patch broke       →  15 minutes
wait for the party to assemble        →  ???
get in the mood                       →  priceless
not screw up in front of teammates    →  the whole evening
carve out two uninterrupted hours     →  do those exist

A «bad» one just requires opening the client; matchmaking does the rest by itself in thirty seconds and there you are, blasting spiders or scoring one more goal with a bumper. Talk of an hour's worth of enjoyment? Forget it. An hour of enjoyment assumes you have that hour... a free hour, a whole hour in the right mood with nobody around. Most adults do not have it; at best they have twenty minutes between «got home from work», «put the kid to bed» and «watched something»... and even that is half an hour of skipping ahead before «passed out». A masterpiece an hour long, or two, physically does not fit into those twenty minutes, no matter which geniuses made it.

There is of course a slice of the «proper» games audience with their guides, optimisations, rankings and the aura of some kind of immortals who found four hundred hours for a game. But it seems to me they have found yet another way to turn pleasure into unpaid work. And the people who left for «bad» games often left not because of quality... they left because of obligations.

Friends

The second force against which no argument about quality will ever work. You can want a decent game all you like, but if three of the four are already sitting in the lobby, the evening ends not with a philosophical choice and a build tweak but with «right, are we going in?». A match together pins both BG3 and Fallout 2 and Miyazaki's masterpieces to the mat... here a bad game is good right up until the moment you can no longer laugh at it together.

On top of that there is a generational fault line: whoever grew up on pirated discs and single-player campaigns instinctively measures a game by plot, atmosphere and time to the credits. Whoever grew up on F2P and Discord measures how fast you can assemble a party, whether there is a season, whether the chat is still alive after the match. These are simply different definitions of the phrase «good game».

Half of all «why do you play that» actually sounds like «why do you hang out in that bar». Well, because our people are there. Yes, the bar is dodgy, yes, there is a fight every evening, the toilet... hmm, well, it exists... but our people are not going anywhere because of that.

Why a «good» studio makes «bad» things

This is normally where the paragraph about greedy publishers starts, but I have to disappoint you, because I am sitting on the other side of the screen myself. Studios that know how to make good things still end up having to make a service, otherwise the economics of a one-off purchase do not add up.

A finished single-player game is one-off revenue against constant production costs. You pay a team for N months and sell a copy once; after that revenue falls off exponentially, and six months later you either start the next project or disband the team. A service is the same costs spread over years, but with revenue every month for as long as retention holds.

An hour of content in a AAA single-player game is very expensive, creeping towards the order of magnitude of about a million evergreens. An hour of content in a service of comparable quality costs noticeably less, say two hundred thousand — a substantial difference, but the difference is not even in the production price, it is in how many times that hour gets consumed.

An hour of single-player is played once, fine... maybe twice, very rarely three times if the game is truly a masterpiece. Okay, if we manage to ship a remake or a redux they will play it once more. That gives us four at most. The player saw the cutscene, cleared the location, found out who the traitor is, and that is it... that hour has been used and will never repeat. So you paid a million for two or three views per player.

An hour of service content will be a map, a mode, an event or a boss that people come back to again and again. Twenty times, a hundred times, a whole season. Now you paid two hundred thousand and you divide it not by players but by playthroughs.

Bringing in a player costs roughly the same for a single-player game as for a service; the ad people do not ask what your business model is — either way you paid a dollar. Only in single-player that dollar pays for itself in one transaction and it sold your box once. Thank you, goodbye. In a service that very same dollar pays for itself every month the player stays, and after a year it has paid off 12 times, and after two, 24.

No magic, just the same hour working once or a hundred times. The same acquisition dollar coming back once or twenty times. And after that you can philosophise about souls and masterpieces at length, preferably far away from the decision-makers and the producer.

Because if you look at this arithmetic not as a player but as a producer answering for whether the team will have work in a year, the «service» game stops looking «bad» and starts looking like a way not to lay off a hundred excellent specialists for another year.

This is not a justification, and I understand your outrage in the comments, but it changes nothing and it is addressed to the wrong people. The complaint «why did you make dailies» is levelled at a designer, but the tables behind those dailies are filled in by players with their own actions, reviews and forum posts, which turn into metrics, out of which management builds the plan for next quarter.

Not everything is about money

About five per cent of «bad» gaming is simply a cheap, short, silly and necessary game. Necessary too, when you have no strength left for a masterpiece but you do want to play something. Sometimes it is free, sometimes bad by critics' taste, but it lands perfectly in somebody's very specific fantasy: fishing from a tractor in the woods, Excel spreadsheets in space, chicken collecting, a pressure-washing simulator. There are far more people with strange fantasies than you can imagine, and the «bad games» market is the only place where anyone caters to those fantasies at all.

If you removed money and marketing from the equation, some of the «bad» games would disappear. And with them would disappear thousands of hours of shared time, memes, friendships across half a country and strange stories people later retell over coffee. Not the worst trade, honestly.

A non-conclusion

I still begrudge the time spent on yet another wonky title and I still think one should play good games and not play bad ones. But I will not argue about it; sometimes I hear «drop the dailies, make a game, not a product»... which stings, because games have been a product since the very first cartridge.

The other question is what exactly is being sold to you — access to an experience, or the option not to wait? In the first case you are buying a game, in the second, your own time. Both exchanges bring somebody pleasure, presumably... I do not enjoy rearranging virtual dishes in a virtual house, but my «good» games are somebody else's «bad» ones.